About

THE SSIDD

Vision

The theory and practice of dialectical disputation in Islamicate thought and intellectual history, despite a handful of seminal contributions, remains critically under-examined in modern scholarship. The aim of this current website is to promote its exploration, and to plant the seed for an eventual Society for the Study of Islamicate Dialectical Disputation (SSIDD). Beginning with an online forum (see link in the menu above), the SSIDD will soon, it is hoped, provide an interactive and interdisciplinary venue for research collaborations, workshops, and publications–an online community of scholars dedicated to understanding the technical notions and logical structures of jadal, munāẓara, and the ādāb al-baḥth, their sitz im leben and pedagogy, thescholarly and societal contexts of their theoretical elaboration and practice, and their powerful, formative dynamicsin the thought and intellectual history of Islamicate civilization.

This current website, in addition to hosting a gateway to the SSIDD Forum, will provide listings and links to relevant primary sources (pdfs of critical editions, and digitized manuscript witnesses), secondary studies (dissertations, monographs, articles), and video commentaries; a series of posts on distinct elements and strategies of variant dialectical theories, and on illustrations of Islamic dialectic in action (as culled from reports and transcribed debates); and further links to relevant researchers, professors, and projects.

NB: The SSIDD website will always, in a sense, be “under construction.” The bibliographies in particular will be under continual development, as more edited primary works and secondary studies are published or discovered, and records of relevant manuscript witnesses added. If you wish to suggest additional works for the bibliographies, please contact me via the link in the menu above.

Membership

At this stage, membership is simply a matter of following the SSIDD website and/or registering in the SSIDD forum ( http://ssidd.freeforums.net/ ). Members are especially encouraged to post questions or announcements and initiate / respond to discussions in the forum. Relevant announcements or essays may also be submitted for posting directly on the website, for the broader public eye, in the “Announcements” or “Posts on Theory” or “Posts on Practice” sections. Contributions and suggestions are encouraged and welcomed. If you are a scholar whose past or current research is relevant to the study of Islamicate dialectical disputation, please contact me via the link in the menu above, and I will add your professional / project / publication page(s) to the “People and Projects” section.

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